What you think about live chat has nothing to do with the actual business.
Live chat is powerful. It brings in sales, revenue, and profits.
The numbers are on the wall.
Your competition is already taking notice.
According to Gorgias, more 85% of companies are projected to be using it in 2022 (your competition is included).
Regardless of the type of business you run — be it eCommerce, SaaS, content creation, selling memberships or courses, or even blogging as a business — live chat statistics prove that using a chatbot or a live chat widget on your website can make you some serious money.
More than 8000+ brands already laughed all the way to the bank. Literally.
It really pays to learn to use live chat for eCommerce and for every other business out there.
Here’s a little something for you, as far as live chat statistics go:
- More than 66% of your potential (and existing customers) need resolutions, answers, or fixes instantly.
- In 2021, brands earned an average of $38,702 from conversations involving chat (using Gorgias as the main customer support platform).
- Companies that use chatbots or live chat on their websites saved a whopping $300,000 (on staffing, avoiding high customer churn, and reducing overall operational expenses).
- According to Outgrow, more than 69% of internet users prefer chatbots since they get answers “immediately” to questions they might have, if any.
- Over 33% of your potential audience would love to use the chatbots themselves to “take action” (such as to sign up to be a part of your email subscriber list).
Read more:
22+ Live Chat Statistics You Need To Know [https://www.gorgias.com/blog/live-chat-statistics]
60+ Customer Service Statistics You Should Know
Let’s dig into some of the best live chat tools, live chat platforms, or even comprehensive all-in-one customer success platforms for your business:
Note: some of these live chat tools are also full-fledged, comprehensive platforms that offer way more than just live chat. For instance, Gorgias also comes with email, social media, and phone.
You also get order management, comprehensive custom history, customer management, customer support automation and more. For the purposes of this blog post, we are only focusing on the “live chat” features available.
How to Choose Live Chat Tools For Your Business?
No business is built the same. Choose from any of these live chat tools depending on exactly what your business needs, your budget, requirements, team size, and more.
Note: If you are a course creator, Podia has live chat built in (so you can skip these).
Here’s a helpful guide on How to Choose Between Live Chat or Chatbots
A few others on the list are dedicated Live chat tools that you could use.
You pick.
Gorgias live chat
Gorgias live chat tool is a fast-loading, easy-to-use widget that helps you “be there” when it matters, handling objections or to answer customer queries.
These are high-intent interactions. They make money. You just keep underestimating it.
Small talk leads to high-intent conversions.
Gorgias live chat feature helps you manage customer interactions but it doesn’t stop at that.
You also get to:
- Tailor targeted prompts based on pages they are visiting, behavior, or actions visitors take on your website or eCommerce store.
- Promote your products, announce sales, or push discounts (if any).
- Resolve order-related or other specific questions your customers have.
- Offer proactive support (instead of waiting for questions to roll in), pull customer history, product information, and orders from connected Shopify stores (for instance)
- Switch from a chatbot campaign or automated live chat to a real person when required.
- Route specific queries or questions to other agents (if needed)
Every live chat interaction and all responses to an automated live chat or chatbot-driven conversations stay in archives.
This allows you to connect other agencies, schedule after-business messages, and even help shoppers help themselves.
Intercom Live Chat Messenger
Intercom has long been a favorite when it comes to their live chat solution. Several SaaS businesses make it a priority to ensure that there’s a way for visitors, existing and potential customers to have a 1:1 chat with their respective queries, questions, doubts, and more.
Specifically, Intercom calls its live chat or chat bot tool “business messenger” and it’s usually what you’ll find on almost any SaaS website or platform now-a-days.
Using Intercom, you can expect to resolve 1.6X more business queries than without. Intercom customers see customer resolutions TAT decrease by 37%.
Personalize chat experiences, automate chatbots, integrate with more than 300+ apps, and create workflows around these interactions with customers.
LiveChat
LiveChat is where some of those standalone products built for chatbots and live chat itself come to shine through.
LiveChat – the product — goes the extra mile when it comes to “omnichannel messaging” — bringing the following channels into its fold:
- Messenger (the widget that goes on your site)
- Apple business chat
- SMS
- Whatsapp (Learn more about how to use the Meta Business Suite)
- Apps, Website
- Chatlink
With LiveChat, you can:
- Use artificial intelligence and qualify leads
- Promote your products and services
- Track your sales goals, analytics, and results
- Provide a chat experience that your customers love (and are familiar with)
- Anticipate questions and answer accordingly
- Provide proactive customer support
Of course, you can deploy automated chatbots (driven by AI), route chat sessions to agents, segment your visitors, and integrate with 200+ tools.
LiveChat also has other products (if needed on a standalone basis) such as KnowledgeDesk, ChatBots, and HelpDesk.
HelpScout Live Chat
HelpScout is one of the top eCommerce tools for customer support featuring a full basket of solutions for better customer experience including workflows, integrations, knowledge base, shared inboxes, customer management, and reporting.
HelpScout live chat helps you not only engage with your customers but also helps push your knowledge base, FAQs, or readily available data bank of anticipated questions (with answers) inside the live chat widget itself.
Lead with answers, make self-help fun again, and easily escalate to a real person (agent) when your customers don’t seem to find what they need.
ZenDesk Live Chat
ZenDesk is a full-featured, comprehensive customer management solution that can bring in email, messages, social media, and even voice into the mix.
Of course, you can also build a community and/or a help center for customer self-service.
ZenDesk Live Chat or ZenDesk Messaging allows you to start conversations with your customers on the web, on mobile apps, and social channels.
As with other live chat solutions here, you can deploy chatbots and intervene when necessary. Have continuous (and customized) conversations without your customers having to repeat themselves.
With ZenDesk you also get to bring in other channels such as WhatsApp, outbound messaging, group messaging, AnswerBots, reporting, and analytics.
FreshDesk Live Chat
FreshDesk is an omni-channel customer management software — a clutch of products, all built to help you provide superior customer service and enable sales.
FreshDesk live chat software is used by at least 50,000+ businesses and is as robust as they come.
Take advantage of a unified inbox (for all messages — chatbots, agent-driven live chat, email, voice, social channels, and more). You also get to pile on self-service avenues such as communities, help desk, knowledge base, and more.
FreshDesk can also help you launch AI-powered chatbots (build your custom chatbots using a chatbot builder) or launch custom workflows around your business.
This is not counting some 1000+ pre-created workflows that you could use and deploy better customer service as fast as you could read this line.
Note: FreshDesk also has FreshMarketer, FreshTeam, FreshSales, and many more products.
GoSquared Live Chat
Most people associate GoSquared to be an easy-to-use alternative for Google Analytics. It is.
But GoSquared is a growth-focused software suite now. With a live chat solution for businesses (among others) that don’t need superhuman efforts for customer service (as those tools above do provide).
GoSquared live chat is ridiculously easy to use, easy to implement (with a single line of JavaScript code on your website), and is perfect for SaaS businesses (although any business can use it. I know I did).
GoSquared Engage provides multi-channel messaging features. Meanwhile, GoSquared Live Chat for sales does exactly that: a way for you to get talking with your visitors.
Convert visitors into leads, sell products or services, onboard new users for your SaaS business, or delight existing customers.
Drift Live Chat
Drift calls itself a “revenue acceleration platform” and it is. Built to help you delight customers and convert them into loyal evangelists, Drift has a lot packed into it with simple to use software tools.
Drift Live Chat is specifically designed for marketing, sales prospecting, and getting people to “talk to you”. Think of it as a high-intent prospecting tool (meaning your prospective clients and customers can even book or schedule time for meetings).
This was also the reason why Drift was mentioned in one of the 7 Top Tools for Video prospecting.
Drift live chat allows you to build custom-built workflows called “play books”, use features such as “chat to call” or “chat to zoom” to instantly get talking in real-time with your prospects.
Drift also comes with a few features that you’d not get elsewhere such as Drift intelligence, Drift meetings, Drift Video, Drift Prospector, Virtual Selling Assistants, and more.
If you run a SaaS business, a B2B business, if you sell services, or if you are a consultant, Drift is what you should be using.
Olark
Olark is a standalone live chat tool. It does what it promises to do, and really well at that.
Olark features live chat tools such as live chat itself. Along with live chat, you also get live chat analytics, team management, power-ups, live chat automation, integrations, security, and customization.
With Olark live chat itself, you also get visitor tracking, file transfers (and sharing), chat transfers (route to an agent), chat notifications, and more.
A few tweaks to Olark, and you can get your live chat or chatbots up and running. That means a channel to bring in more sales and revenue for your business.
PureChat
PureChat does what you think it does. Together with unlimited chats, chat history, and a powerful dashboard, it helps you manage your live chat sessions seamlessly.
PureChat also comes with a fully-featured mobile app (to allow you to talk even when on the move) and manage your conversations easily.
Simple, transparent, easy-to-use, and bloat-free. Designed for simple businesses that don’t want the moon but a simple live chat solution for their businesses.
HubSpot Live Chat
Some businesses swear by HubSpot. Then, there are others that keep looking for HubSpot alternatives.
Either way, HubSpot Live Chat is free to use (with some limitations unless you go with the complete HubSpot for Sales, HubSpot CRM, or HubSpot for Service suites they have available).
HubSpot live chat allows you to have contextually-rich, on-point communications with your prospective customers. If you are already using HubSpot, using the HubSpot live chat is a no-brainer.
You can easily add the HubSpot live chat widget to your HubSpot-powered website, back it up with HubSpot CRM, and all chat conversations get into your “conversations Inbox”.
HubSpot Live Chat widget is customizable (match your brand). You can qualify leads, book meetings, provide answers to customers’ questions, and more.
Zoho SalesIQ
Zoho has many things going for it. One of those is Zoho SalesIQ — a complete solution built for your business to deploy live chat solutions, manage conversations, make sales, and build revenue.
Built for marketing, sales, and support, Zoho SalesIQ is robust. You can tailor your messages, have proactive conversations, gather intelligence or insights, and more.
Of course, it obviously plays well with Zoho’s other products such as Zoho CRM. Want to go mobile? Use their mobile SDK (Called Mobilisten).
Trusted by almost 500,000+ businesses globally, Zoho promises a lot more than just live chat though (outside the scope of this post).
Podium
Podium has a focus on “text” — along with live chat and other tools. Plus, it seems to be built for local businesses (I suspect that any business can use it). The reason why it’s special is because there are elements that really work great in favor of local businesses looking for a set of solutions to help grow their respective businesses.
An easy way to acquire Google reviews, payments, and then text and website live chat — that’s precisely what Podium promises. Podium also has a shared inbox, video face-to-face chat, text payments, card readers, and more.
Podium looks like it’s a great set of live chat and other solutions for local auto, retail, home services, dental, and several other businesses.
Chaport
Chaport provides live chat, multi-channel messaging (web, WhatsApp, mobile), SSL encryption, social (including Viber, Telegram), autoresponders, custom chatbots, and several integrations (including Zapier).
Chaport’s live widget itself comes with basic and advanced customization. Further, you can also generate leads by using ‘auto-invitations’, pre-chat forms, email requests.
As with most other live chat tools here, you can also use offline messages, group chats, file transfers, notifications, detailed visitor information, visitor notes, and custom fields.
Of course, you also get chat transfers, chat management, reporting, support, and more.
Tidio
Tidio focuses on live chat mainly. With a comprehensive set of features just to make live chat work for your business (including sales, marketing, and support).
Some powerful features help make Tidio stand out from the rest (apart from laser focus on live chat alone): Multi-channel and cross-channel communications, live visitor list (and preview); shared inboxes; Instagram and Facebook (Meta) messenger integration; and email inboxes.
Tidio chat bots allow you a kickstart with 35+ pre-designed templates or workflows for chatbots.
You could, for instance, show returning visitors exclusive discounts; recommend products (tailor-made for specific visitors); save instances of abandoned carts, and more.
ClickDesk
How would you like it if you knew exactly what you had to know about your visitors even before they started chatting away?
ClickDesk live chat aims to provide you with actionable intelligence.
ClickDesk maps and visitor information provides the name, email, country, chat history, browser and referring URL. Initiate conversations with your hottest leads. Filter visitors by country, web activity, chat status and more.
Other interesting features of ClickDesk live chat tool are multi-lingual support, pre-chat surveys, proactive chat greetings, ability to manage chats from any device, and more.
ClickDesk also has what it calls “Keystroke Preview” — which lets you understand your visitors, anticipate their questions, negotiate better and close more sales.
Which of these live chat tools or solutions do you use for your business? Let me know.
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